The Episcopal Bishop of Washington, for instance, made the following statement in a Washington Post Op-Ed piece (26 February 2006) entitled ‘A Gospel of Intolerance’:
“The archbishop’s [Akinola’s] support for this law [the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill 2006] violates numerous Anglican Communion documents that call for a “listening process” involving gay Christians and their leaders. But his contempt for international agreements also extends to Articles 18-20 of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which articulates the rights to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, association and assembly. Surprisingly, few voices - Anglican or otherwise - have been raised in opposition to the archbishop. When I compare this silence with the cacophony that followed the Episcopal Church’s decision to consecrate the Rt Rev Gene Robinson, a gay man who lives openly with his partner, as the bishop of New Hampshire, I am compelled to ask whether the global Christian community has lost not only its backbone but its moral bearings.”
Have Anglicans failed?
Is this charge fair? In its first part, it probably is. The question of human rights and gay people, in a world riven by violence and the trampling of civil liberties, is morally too important and politically substantive to evade, especially as it finds itself exposed right in the middle of a major and historically critical theological debate within the Communion regarding sexuality. Many African nations where the Anglican Church is active, in fact, legally prohibit homosexual activity, and accompany conviction of such crimes with a range of sanctions that are often quite severe by Western standards. It seems not only odd, but scandalously irresponsible, that these political and humanitarian realities have not been confronted openly in the course of the present debates, despite pleas from many that this happen.
The second part of the charge - that this failure to discuss sexuality and human rights among churches, including African ones, amounts to a moral complicity in abuse, as in Nigeria - seems difficult to uphold in its bare meaning. This is largely because the charge assumes the discussion’s conclusion, that is, that the legal status of homosexuals in many African countries where the Church is active itself equates with abuse. And this kind of assumption is precisely what cannot be embraced at this stage. The issues of legal rights for gay people and the church’s teaching and moral duties with respect to the state on this topic are complex, and certainly far from consensually resolved at this point, in the West as much as anywhere. It is not at all clear, for instance, what the theological value of a category called “homosexual” or “gay” might be, just as historically and biologically there is currently much dispute over the etiology and substantive reality of a “homosexual identity”. In the Christian discussion of human “rights”, furthermore, such rights are normally seen to adhere to a person qua human creature, not primarily to a person as a member of a human subgroup, however ordered. (Hence the Roman Catholic Church tends to speak of “persons” with “homosexual inclinations” rather than of “homosexuals” as a common type of human being.) Distinguishing something called “gay rights” is therefore highly problematic.